The Fourth Part of the World
Europeans have thought for millennia that the globe is divided into three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They depicted the three continents in a variety of forms and sizes on their maps, but they occasionally alluded to the presence of a "fourth portion of the earth," a mysterious, unreachable region separated from the rest by a great ocean. It was a mythical realm until Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, two minor academics laboring in the eastern French highlands, made it real in 1507. Columbus had died the year before believing that he had sailed to Asia, but after reading about Columbus's contemporary Amerigo Vespucci's Atlantic discoveries, Waldseemüller and Ringmann came to a stunning conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth portion of the Earth. To commemorate his feat, Waldseemüller and Ringmann published a large map depicting the New World surrounded by ocean and separate from Asia for the first time, and they named it America in honor of Vespucci.
The tale behind that map is The Fourth Part of the World, a spectacular chronicle of geographical and intellectual discovery replete with outsized ideas and expeditions. Toby Lester takes a colorful approach to tracing the origins of our modern worldview. His story spans continents and decades, revealing strands of ancient folklore, Biblical prophesy, classical study, mediaeval adventure, imperial aspirations, and more as he zooms in on different parts of the world. The map comes to life in Lester's telling: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries travel across Central Asia and China; Europe's early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci embark on their epic voyages of discovery; and, most importantly, Nicholas Copernicus appears, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseemüller map that the sun revolves around the earth. The map has a profound impact on humanity's perception of the planet.
The map was produced in 1,000 copies, but only one has survived. It was discovered by chance in the library of a German castle in 1901 and purchased by the Library of Congress in 2003 for an unusual cost of $10 million, where it is currently on permanent public display. The Fourth Part of the Planet is the narrative of that map: the brilliant storey of the geographical and intellectual voyages that have helped us interpret our world, lavishly illustrated with rare maps and illustrations.
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